The ceremony for the final signing of the Peace Agreements between the FARC guerrillas and the government led by Juan Manuel Santos, will occur on September 26, in Cartagena de Indias [Colombia]. The event will count with the presence of representatives all over the world, starting with Barack Obama, representant of the US Imperialism; the president of the Spanish State, Mariano Rajoy; Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro –special guest-; the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and probably a high representative of the European Union.
The imperialism and the bourgeoisie score another point
We need to question why the imperialism and the bourgeoisie gave so much importance and display to these Peace Agreements in Colombia, and why the world press showed the agreements as if the people accept it harmonically. The surveys show a great majority in favor of the YES on the plebiscite programmed for October 2nd. With it, the paid press affirms Santos’ government, as much as Obama and the Castro, are all together interpreting the will of the Colombian people. The president Juan Manuel Santos himself said: “This may be the most important announcement I have ever made in my life”.
We cannot fall for it. For the people, for the workers, the working class and the poor peasants, the agreements are just the possibility of ending a conflict between apparatuses, in which they only bring dead, disappeared and displaced people. For the imperialism and an important sector of the Colombian bourgeoisie, and of course for the neighbor countries, it means a great satisfaction, because by incorporating the FARC to the bourgeois political regime they put an end to the longest guerrilla of the continent, which featured a war during 52 years against the Colombian political regime. As Trotsky said on guerrillas’ war, a small war, because the major one, the civil war, was never a goal of the FARC, and because the FARC did not match with the class struggle nor the workers and peasants’ popular support, which they kept on loosing the more they adopted the methods of individual terrorism, moving apart from the people’s interests.
The imperialism celebrates because, finally, its policy of “stick-and-carrot” policy finally paid off. It tried to defeat it several times militarily, it inflicted several strikes on this field, it eliminated the Patriotic Union –its legal expression during an attempt of peace negotiations during Belisario Betancur’s turn, in mid ‘80s, all of it with the goal of taking the FARC to the negotiation table to seal its surrender, as it did with the Central American guerrillas, through the agreements of Esquipulas and Contadora.[1] As they also did with minor guerrillas like the EPL[2] and the M-19[3] at the beginning of the ‘90s, in the country. Today, the M-19 is presented as an example because of its decision of being incorporated to the regime, as it did not desisted of it even when his presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, was murdered, together with many other leaders, shortly after signing “peace” in 1991, when they first participated on elections and were no longer mobilizing. This what they are now asking the FARC to do, in front of the risk of the same paramilitary groups to murder one or more of their leaders once sealed the peace. And the FARC are willing to do it.
For the imperialism, it means to eliminate a source of instability, an obstacle that was impeding the free entrance of the multinationals to the territories controlled by the guerrilla to install their agro-business; an obstacle impeding its full control over the production and exportation of coca, which also was a source of local instability because of its strategic location as backyard of the US imperialism. To the imperialism, the bourgeoisie, the landowners and farmers, this is a major step forward, as they always feared the small war could become a big war; they feared it would spread like powder, through a region always submitted to misery, starvation and repression.
Politically speaking, they will fill pages and pages showing the greatness of the restricted bourgeois democracy, of its class dictatorship, complementing the possibility of the heat to give space to the votes, and they will claim they will take their former enemies to the palaces and parliaments and, why not, the presidential chair, showing the examples of Nicaragua, El Salvador, South Africa, Brazil, and Colombia itself, with the ex guerrilla fighters of the M-19 and the EPL. With it, they will continue deceiving the working people while they strengthen their armies and implement the plan to load their deep economic crisis over the workers’ shoulders. Santos announced it already. While he brags his triumph, he will implement a tax “reform” and will strengthen the hated ESMAD [Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron] –anti-riot police popularly know as the “robocops”-, because the workers pay for the war, but also for the peace.
The great winner of the agreements of La Habana is the imperialism, which projected the Plan Colombia, invested resources, councils and weaponry, and today are preparing to charge the bill, with the famous investment plans for the post-conflict, in which the multinationals will benefit out of tax break, absolute freedom to invest their capitals, pillage the wealth, and get multiplies profits.
The FARC’s most important battle?
It is not strange to see the leadership of the FARC presenting the signing of the agreements as “the most important of our battles”, like Raúl Castro presented the re-establishment of relations with the US government as a “great triumph of the revolution”. Ultimately, both come from the same tendency: Stalinism. It is not by chance the scenario of the negotiations is La Habana. The Stalinist school trained them very well; all their capitulations and betrayals were always presented as great triumphs. The truth is, relying on the prestige they got with the Cuban revolution, the Castro restored capitalism in their country silently, and they restored relations, not only diplomatic but commercial and of all kind with their old enemy, the US imperialist bourgeoisie, because they share the interest of boosting the capitalist development, now as good partners. And this is one of the reasons, the main one, why the FARC finally signed and that is nothing but their incorporation to the bourgeois regime.
During the second half of the ‘80s, the FARC reached a crossroad for a series of factors. The statements of Fidel Castro in front of the Nicaraguan revolution, “Nicaragua will not be a new Cuba”, were a message for the bourgeoisie and the imperialism, meaning neither the Cuban nor the URSS bureaucracies would support the expropriation of the Nicaraguan capitalists. So, they would not pose an expropriation program like the one they had to implement in Cuba, pushed by the mass mobilization and the imperialist policy. The FARC understood the message. From there on, the Stalinist apparatus supported all the negotiated peace processes and the reincorporation of the guerrillas to the “civil life”. From there on, their democratic revolutionary program, specially regarding the land, change radically. The peace negotiation during Belisario’s government were not successful because a sector of the Colombian bourgeoisie and the farmers, relying on paramilitary groups, from which several multinationals also took advantage, launched a violent selective and systematic massacre, not only against the Patriotic Union but against the workers’ and unionist vanguard that was radicalizing the struggles and strikes, forcing the FARC and the ELN to trench and respond militarily to the attacks. The capitalist restoration in the so-called “real socialism” countries would finally seal its contradiction.
Lost the political and economic support of the URSS and Cuba, it was impossible to keep an army of thousands of fighters. The leadership of the FARC began an irreversible process of search of resources, using more and more the methods of kidnapping and extortion, not only to landowners and farmers but also to middle [class] peasants and other poor sectors of the population. At the same time, they gave steps first as protectors of the coca plantations, and then as members of the production and commercialization business, making part of the underground economy, which was becoming another source of distortion of the workers and popular struggles, and that together with its strategy of armed apparatus, justified the violent repression of an antidemocratic, bloody regime. These financing methods ended up degrading them politically and isolating them from the population. The bourgeoisie and the imperialism knew how to take political advantage of the degradation of the guerrilla, and they consciously deepened the growing loss of popular and peasant support, they created the groups of mercenaries’ armies, paramilitary, to get rid of guerrilla fighters but also inconvenient workers’ activists, peasants’ leaders, activists in general, by organizing one of the major deprivation of land, causing an internal displacement that exceeds 6 million – the second country with more displaced people after Syria, in open and declared war. The National Centre of Historical Memory gave the number of 220.000 dead people during the years of confrontation –clarifying the number is cautious- and 162.000 disappeared, besides the more than 300.000 threats, product of which many people had to leave the country.
It is clear that the guerrilla strategy showed complete failure, a failure the working class, the workers and poor peasants had to pay with blood and fire. The socialists always fought politically the guerrilla strategy. Our Trotskyist leader Nahuel Moreno said: “There are the masses the ones that make the revolutions; all preach, in propaganda or practice (through actions), that there is a minority of guerrilla fighters who make the revolution is an element that causes deep demobilization of the mass movement; it goes against the revolution.
Even worst, they use the working class, if they intervene on it, to provide soldiers, taking valuable activists and strugglers of the working class (and sending them to die), weakening the organization of the working class”.[4] Today, the FARC and their legal political movement abandon definitely the struggle for the land and against the antidemocratic regime, and adopt a new program: the one of the peace agreements of La Habana, the one they made a commitment to defend, and because of which they are willing to scarify even more lives. Because while they demobilize, the groups of paid hit men do not, and during the last part of the process they continued threatening, attacking and murdering. Since 2012 until March 2016, they have murdered more than 112 activists of Marcha Patrótica, movement partially influenced by the FARC.
We will see one more movement of the ones we have seen already in several parts of the planet. Electoral movements which changed bullets for voted, and which defend the bourgeois democracy as long as they can enjoy the package, the privileges for some at the expense of starvation, oppression and misery for the vast majority, including their own bases. They cannot say this new program is revolutionary, because that means to continue lying to the working class and the workers of the countryside and the cities; it would be as much as saying Santos and Obama are also revolutionaries. The FARC signed sweetened agreements, to deceive; but in essence, it is the program of the major sector of the Colombian bourgeoisie and the imperialism. It is the program on the defense of the private property, not the expropriation program of the Cuban revolution of 1959, already buried by Castro. The vast majority of the lef-wing organizations that support the “reconciliation” program is making explicit its abandonment of the revolution they defended so long ago. By supporting the peace agreements and call to vote for Santos first and for the YES in the plebiscite now, they are adopting the same program. We will continue to struggle politically, as we did before with the guerrilla strategy, the program of “radicalizing democracy” they now offer to the masses. We will continue to raise, with even more strength, the program of the socialist world revolution as an immediate necessity of the working class and its allies, the impoverished, humiliated, segregated, exploited masses.
The workers will not have peace
The cycle of the capitalist exploitation will continue, intensified by the economic world crisis. It is a law: for the businessmen to overcome the crisis, they have to increase the super-exploitation of the working class in the city and the countryside, loading on its back the plans the IMF is demanding all over the world. More adjustment, cut of public expenses, tax reforms, unemployment. The opium of the peace will have to confront this reality. Now there is a possibility for Colombia to enter the dynamic of the class struggle along South America, which has shown general strikes, revolutions, changes of governments and regimes. Released from the war apparatus straightjacket, the truth is nothing will be the same.
The socialists bet on this perspective. We bet on the working class to be in the center, for the workers to go back to its methods of massive struggle, taking the leadership of the conflicts and organizations in their own hands; the popular sectors to explode against their sinister political and social life conditions, and the indigenous movement to raise for their rights; for the women and victims of so many abuses and attacks continue to demand justice and reparation, together with the thousands of victims of the conflict and the displaced peasants. We bet on the struggle of the exploited and oppressed ones, on the class struggle, and not on the program the new political movements are betting on: unity with the ones above, reformism with no reforms. Because the organized mass struggle, not replaced by any Messiah, will open the possibility for the revolutionary party, the one that bets on the working class, the internationalist one, to become an leadership alternative to achieve true peace, the one workers deserve, of a society with no exploitation and oppression of any kind. To that construction, to this struggle and for this alternative, we call all activists who believed honestly but incorrectly in the guerrilla, which now capitulates to the bourgeois democracy and the authoritarian regime, negotiating with the corrupt pro-imperialist bourgeoisie which pillaged the wealth of the country and repressed strongly the struggle of the exploited and oppressed ones.
This is why, on October 2nd, we call together with the PST [Socialist Workers’ Party – Colombia], our national section, to not vote for the YES of Santos, neither for the NO of Uribe, on the plebiscite for the peace agreements. The dilemma is not between one or other “fraction” of the bourgeoisie, the guerrillist Uribe or the democratic Santos. The FARC have declared even if the NO wins, they will not take the arms against, and they will honor the agreements. So the dilemma actually is between supporting the bourgeois imperialist plans post conflict, or declaring the war to the social war against the working class, poor peasants, indigenous people and all exploited ones, for which Santos is preparing. So we invite to write in the ticket: for a broad, free, democratic, sovereign Constituent, to debate the post conflict program of the ones below, the ones always neglected.
International Secretariat of IWL-FI.
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[1] Peace agreements for Central America, particularly Guatemala, driven by the Contadora Group.
[2] Ejército Popular de Liberación – Popular Liberation Army.
[3] Movimiento 19 de Abril – April 19th Movement, guerrilla which demobilized to form the legal party M-19 Democratic Alliance.
[4] Nahuel Moreno, “Thesis on the Guerrilla”. Quotation translated by the editorial team.
